The Future Of Money: Christian Nold and The Bijlmer Euro

I am launching a new interview series examining the future of money. I plan to be talking with all sorts of people: artists (like today’s Christian Nold), futurists (like Jamais Cascio), writers (Bruce Sterling interview later this week, and Steven Berlin Johnson in the near future), economists, philanthropists, and all sorts of other people interested in where this is headed.

This series is sponsored in part by Neo.org, a non-profit I am working with. Bill Liao, one of the founders of Neo, characterizes the organization this way:

Neo is a movement that includes a powerful combination of elements: a currency, a legal structure, a constitution, a web presence and a unique global network of people declaring themselves and their optimism for a better world future.

Because of Neo’s efforts toward defining and implementing a new digital currency, I thought that a series on the future of money might line up well, and draw some attention to Neo’s efforts.

For my first interview, I contacted Christin Nold, an artist I met a few weeks ago at the FutureSonic conference in Manchester, England. He is perhaps best known for his Emotional Cartography work, which has recently been published as a downloadable pdf. As he describes it,

Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists,
designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visulising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences
using technology.

His work in this area has been widely reviewed, and I had in fact read about it, but I didn’t connect it with Nold until he referred to it in his talk in Manchester.

His bio sheds some light on his orientation:

Christian Nold is an artist, designer and educator working to develop new participatory models for communal representation. In 2001 he wrote the well received book ‘Mobile Vulgus’, which examined the history of the political crowd and which set the tone for his research into participatory mapping. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2004, Christian has led a number of large scale participatory projects and worked with a team on diverse academic research projects. In particular his ‘Bio Mapping’ project has received large amounts of international publicity and been staged in 16 different countries and over 1500 people have taken part in workshops and exhibitions. These participatory projects have a strong pedagogical basis and grew out of Christian’s formal university teaching. He is currently based at the Bartlett, University College London.

Christian appears in the Art programme with Biotagging Manchester link and the Environment Open Lab on Saturday link

His talk in Manchester went off in a slightly different direction. It was about the Bijmer Euro: “The Bijlmer Bank is a project by Christian Nold commissioned by Imagine IC that examines how trust networks function in the Bijlmer area in South East Amsterdam. The aim is to develop a prototype system for an alternative local currency that could support local development and work in conjunction with the Euro.”


Bijlmer Euro, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The project explores many angles — sociological, political, and economic — but I was fascinated by the idea of ‘parasitical money’. Nold stripped the RFID tag out of Amsterdam travel tickets, and stuck it on Euros, so their physical movement — from store to store — can be traced, and mapped.


Some highlights:

  • Christian describes his work in emotional mapping, and the device he built to measure physiological arousal, which he pairs with location — wandering through a city recalling a relationship, for example — with very interesting emotional resonance.
  • His focus has moved to localism, “scaling things up”. He decided to look at money, as a social substrate, and a physically shared object. He looked at the ‘transion town’ movement in the UK, a localism movement linked closely with food and ‘resilient’ economics.
  • He was interested in the Bijlmer area, with over 100 nationalities living there. Many of these folks will send money home, such as Surinam, a former Dutch colony. Many migrants have many social conventions for dealing with money, with cross continental money systems.
  • He was exploring identity through money, in this particular place, which doesn’t even have a defined boundary. He was in part interested with resilience.
  • They glued on the RFID tags. People could get these in the stores, and get an incentive (discount) on goods. This avoids the need for trust in some other group making their own currency. But by making the money parasitic on a fiat currency, that trust issue is avoided.
  • This breaks down the idea of the neighborhood as a ghetto, and makes it seem like a place, a community, a collection of networks.
  • His description of the war between tokos (Ghanaian corner stores) and Western Union pushing their money transfer models via radio advertising is fascinating, and he makes a case that is is impossible to separate the social connection to money. He raise tough questions, for example, if he were to set up as a bank, and supporting legal transfer of funds, what would the impact be on the radio stations in Bijlmer? He notes that euros and Surinam dollars could be linked through this approach.

I am looking forward to following Nold’s future endeavors at his website. I have a feeling that this notion of parasitic money, riding on top of fiat currencies, is a massive idea. Consider that any interest group or locality could adopt this model, even going across borders. A group could use RFID tags on different currencies — dollars, and euros for example — in a global fashion, and sidestepping the question of deep trust in the organization, since the underlying money has independent value.

Although Nold is fixated on the specific, I believe that we can find common patterns across people’s use of money, universals, as well.